Lyrical Summations
by L.C1
Summary: We few, we lucky few.


TITLE: Lyrical Summations  
AUTHOR: L.C.  
E-MAIL: AFPN318@aol.com  
SPOILERS: Not a one.  
RATING: Heavy R, NC17 if you're sensitive.  
PAIRING: Snape/Draco  
DISCLAIMER: Not mine. Never will be mine. Oh, how I weep. Would you begrudge me this small measure of comfort?  
SUMMARY: We few, we lucky few.  
  
Dedicated to Bec, the Magnificent. You *are* the tenth muse; screw Sappho.  
  
-----------  
  
This--what they have--would be called immoral, Draco knows. Immoral and probably illegal, since he is a student here and therefore a corruptible innocent and Snape is taking the most shameful sort of advantage of him.  
  
Which is of course rubbish. There's been no advantage-taking here, except perhaps that of the world over Draco, and there certainly doesn't seem to be a law against *that.*  
  
There's been no power-play, no misuse of authority. This is no scandal for the Weekly Witch to swoon over. Their relationship--and god, could that word be more sterile?--is simply beyond propriety. Beyond the rules, set down by people who don't understand, who've never needed that one touch, any touch, from someone as filthy as they, as irredeemable and worthless and hanging on anyway for no visible reason except that it took more effort to unclench your fingers from the edge than to just let the edge crumble away.  
  
Well, the *rules* can go fuck themselves, go live in that happy-happy land where the violent rages of the heart give a damn about twenty year age differences. Draco doesn't feel abused. When they are together, in the dark, sighing and sliding and mouthing, he feels simply human. Brought together. As though the complications that riddle his life might be dissolved to nothing with a forceful enough--not love. *Attention.*  
  
Nonsense, of course. But it's some quote somewhere, isn't there--'a little nonsense now and then'--  
  
One needs these things.   
  
So. They have their meetings. Oh, they have a great deal of meetings--the secret tutoring sessions in which Draco learns far more curses than have ever made their way onto the approved curriculum. Snape told him, long ago, that first year, what his father had been afraid to say.  
  
"There's going to be a war," he had said to the small scared boy in front of him, his bravado punctured now that there were no peers to show off for. "You're going to fight it. And you'll win. That's given, understand. My job--" He stopped, sizing up the young Draco with an eye designed to terrify. "My job is to ensure you fight on the right side."   
  
So Draco had learnt curses, and strategy, and potions that caused sleeping and sickness and madness and several different kinds of death. There'd been countercurses, too, and antidotes, and one time when Snape had simply rolled up his sleeve, described exactly *how* that mark had gotten there, and sent Draco away to the nightmares they both knew he'd have, in which glowing red irons seared his skin until there was nothing left of him but ashes.  
  
They grew to be twined together in some odd and perhaps poisonous way. It had started long before things had become--physical. Long before that accidentally significant touch in October of fifth year, when Draco had been almost--almost, but never--sobbing in agony after failing to deflect a hard blast of the Cruciatus curse. Snape had lifted the hex moments after he saw that Draco had caught it full-on. Not immediately, of course, that would defeat the purpose. But quick enough not to quibble details. The wordless, capering pain faded away quickly, but his nerve endings trembled in reaction and every. single. part of him ached, as if his entire body had seized up in a horrendous cramp.  
  
Snape had picked his limp, jerking body up off the floor, then, and held him firmly. Not like he might hold an infant, or even a lover. Just--steady. Patient. The way he'd done a hundred times before, each time he pushed Draco past the next barrier of anguish, each time he put the boy through his paces and cleaned him up afterwards. No one could have told the difference, then, but it was there. The natural outgrowth, perhaps, of plunging two people into the same fire together; they turn to each other or they die.  
  
And Malfoys did not die. It simply wasn't done.   
  
Whatever the bond was, neither Snape nor Draco gave more than the barest pretense towards trying to deny their urges. Draco wanted comfort, Snape was hardly an ascetic, such things happened. If someone took issue with one slight pale boy creeping into the Head of House's room after hours, well, they could very well cope with their own problems, couldn't they?  
  
So they had what they had, and the years moved firmly on, and Draco's graduation grew steadily closer, hailed by a secretive and sideways letter from his father. Draco puzzled over the missive for almost an hour before taking it to Snape, who gave it a cursory glance before ripping it into pieces and tossing it in the trash.  
  
"Nothing we didn't know," he said. "Lucius is just going through the formalities now. It is almost time."   
  
And now it is the last night. Oh, not at Hogwarts--there are more than two weeks left, they'll see each other plenty. But the last *night.* The only nights Draco's really counted for the last so many years.  
  
The sides are split, the military offices have been parceled out to those who worked, translation, groveled, the hardest for them, the armies of darkness are waiting for the Word.  
  
And so is Draco.   
  
"Do you suppose," he says, lounging on the lushly-carpeted floor of Snape's private room, "do you suppose I'll be having to kill people right off? Or will they let me sort of ease into it, do you think?"  
  
He can't help laughing at the look Snape shoots him, the one with its hands on its hips and glasses on the end of its nose, saying, You know better than that, boy. The laughter leads to laughter and he suddenly finds he can't breathe, he can only draw in gasps of air that sound like he's some sort of honking waterfowl, and that makes him laugh harder, and now he's *rolling* on Snape's floor, and if he doesn't stop thinking about *that* he'll die of asphyxiation.   
  
"Quit looking at me like that," he manages to choke out, "quit it, you're going to kill me--"  
  
Snape obligingly turns back to the book he was scribbling in while Draco lies on the floor and catches his breath. The older man doesn't look up until the bed dips next to him and Draco places one hand on his chest. Not a demand, it never was, between them. Just--paying attention.   
  
Snape closes the book neatly and lays it on the side table. "Are you done?" he asks, fixing Draco with his rock-chip eyes.  
  
Draco opens his mouth to make some smart remark, the kind that makes Snape roll his eyes and kiss Draco hard and mutter about the lengths he's forced to just to shut him up, and then proceed entirely unfairly to elicit as much noise from the boy as humanly, or more likely inhumanly, possible. Instead, he just says, "Yes."  
  
Snape nods and says, "I think you are," and they're not talking about laughing anymore except maybe they are and Draco doesn't know, doesn't want to know, doesn't, suddenly, want to think about or talk about or acknowledge anything outside this room, this time, this precise moment wherein hangs the balance of an awful lot of things. So he leans in, kisses the mouth he knows better by now than his own, stifling whatever further melancholy conversation Snape might have had in mind with his purposeful tongue, and just for good measure some hand movement too.   
  
While Draco is hardly an innocent by anyone's definition, he is not--as some jealous-minded individuals believe--a slut. He takes girls to dances, kisses them, and, if they are that sort of girl and they expect it, makes out with them in a corner. It's pleasant, easy, and keeps his reputation on a more-or-less even keel. He knows how to make a girl come, if he should want to, which he rarely does. He knows that there's a queue of female students--and quite a few males--who'd fight for the privilege to suck him off. He hasn't taken any of them up on it, although the teasing and stringing along provides much entertainment when life is slow.   
  
Groping at parties is one thing; a recreational activity on the level of, oh, drinking or  
dancing or mocking those who couldn't do either with any ability. Sex is something else entirely. Sex is the darkness of drawn bedcurtains, the deliberate slide of one body on another, the tracing and tasting of scars because of the moans that body makes and how the sounds rend him down to the bone, make him want to offer himself up with a bow around his neck.   
  
Sex is now, here, tugging at Snape's robe and whining like a dog, rubbing his face against the older man's so he could feel the heat of his cheek, the knife-edge of his jaw. Sex is the sensation of all his blood vessels opening up at once when Snape awkwardly but quickly strips Draco of his t-shirt, because *he* at least is efficiency-minded enough to ditch the damned robes before coming down here.   
  
Sex is the sound of the book, that stupid dusty old tome thudding to the floor and spilling half its pages and neither of them giving a fuck about it.   
  
There are words to be said on occasions like these, Draco knows. Words like--goodbye, or, thank you, or, is this all there is? Words they don't need. What have they ever been saying but goodbye?   
  
"Get *up,* you pillock," he sighs, "I can't get your bloody robes off." He arches his back into the warm calloused hand that rubs him, purring like a cat. Snape smiles--a real smile, absent of irony or sadism or detachment, that rarest of magical beasts. "Get off me and I shall," he says, his voice rumbling lower than its usual register, making Draco's skin prickle.   
  
And he does, and he does.   
  
Snape tugs the bedcurtains closed and they move in darkness. There are no words after that. Oh, of course they both mutter and grunt the usual standbys, "yes" and "please" and "ohgodohgodmoremoremore." But there are no conversations, no lyrical summations of seven years spent in one long embrace, no regrets, no farewells, no declarations. The last time around, Snape comes in Draco's mouth, his hips arching almost delicately up towards him. Draco lets him slide away and crawls gracefully up Snape's sated body, curling up in his arms, letting the other man encircle him. They've never slept together, after. The risk of discovery would be too great, and discovery would lead to separation, and Draco hurts at the *thought.*  
  
Neither he nor Snape makes any move to get up tonight, though. The rules, it seems, have changed.   
  
The rules, it would seem, are on their side now.   
  
If Draco can only remember which side they're on.   
  
--le fin--  
  
Constructive criticism is *begged* for, so review or send feedback. I'll bake you cookies. 


End file.
